Amazing what foods you can find in your own– and your neighbor's– backyard. Photo credit: Iso Rabins of ForageSF "What happens on your plates represents your most important engagement with the natural world and the biggest impact you have on climate change." – Michael Pollan

Considering that I work from home, don't fly very often, and walk or take mass transit most places, I bet Michael Pollan is especially right for me. Last June, QUEST had a radio piece on a low carbon diet with tips to lower your CO2 impact, but my inner scientist needs some data. That's when I found the Carbon Foodprint Calculator.

Here's what I ate yesterday:

• Cereal with Milk
• Small Salad
• Chicken Sandwich
• 3 Diet Cokes
• Beer
• Apple, Banana, and some strawberries

My wife usually nags me about my diet, but I think I did pretty well yesterday! (excepting those diet cokes) My carbon foodprint was 2641 CO₂e points. Each point represents 1 gram of CO₂e equivalent or in my case 5.8 lbs of CO₂e. Now this is calculator certainly has limitations (mentioned in their FAQ section), but it is a satisfying comparison study. The site claims that most Americans have room to cut their carbon foodprint 25%. Not easily done, but luckily we have help in the Bay Area.

This weekend, Iso Rabins, founder of ForageSF, is taking an intrepid crew out to learn about foraged foods (virtually zero in carbon foodprint if foraged locally). He'll teach you how to identify wild edibles all around you, from wild fennel to mallow to nettle. Many of the plants we see everyday can be consumed on the spot (although better after a quick rinse). After taking a collecting walk, he'll cook up some snacks that includes some of what was foraged.

On Monday, Chef Laura Stec and climatologist Eugene Cordero cook up some Cool Cuisine, with a discussion of their new cookbook focusing on low carbon recipes. Cordero presents research on the energy efficiency of our food system and the relationship to our changing climate and then Chef Laura provides some practical cooking tips for low carbon foods without sacrificing flavor. For those who can't make the event, you can watch their presentation last month at the PARC Forum.

Guided Foraging Tour with ForageSF & TransportedSF

When: Sunday, August 9^th 12 PM – 7 PM

Where: Meet at Papa Toby's Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF

Cost: $35, Tickets

Environmental Action through Eating: Best Bang for the Buck

When: Monday, August 10^th 6 PM – 730 PM

Where: Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St, 2^nd Floor, SF

Cost: $8 members, $15 non-members, Tickets

A carbon-tracking cell phone. Credit: Nokia
"Do I get to keep the phone?"

Not exactly the environmentally-conscious line of thinking that organizers were hoping for, but understandable for those high-schoolers holding a brand new, latest version of the Nokia in their hands.

The way the San Francisco pilot program works is like this: students get a mobile phone equipped with a GPS maps application. They fill out a profile with the make and model of the cars they use. The cell phone monitors movement, so it picks up when that student is making a car trip. The server factors in the time of day, the weather and humidity, and the type of car the student is riding in – and then calculates the amount of carbon output that trip represents.

The program currently doesn't differentiate between cars and other forms of transportation – bikes, ferries, trains, carpools, buses – so students may need to note when those trips were not regular car trips. The final number is their carbon rating.

When the program expands to three other San Francisco schools at the end of March 2009, a competition will be formed between the high schools to see which group of 25 students can cut back the most on their car trips and carbon output.

That will help answer the question of how much pollution people can save just by altering transportation behavior. And hopefully, the participants here are young enough that those transportation choices might continue after the program has ended. Once they get used to walking or biking, for instance, maybe they'll make that a regular form of transportation.

That, of course, doesn't ameliorate the answer to the other burning question – that, yes, the cool phone goes away when the pilot program ends.

Listen to the Tracking Carbon through Your Cell Phone radio report online.

Jamais Cascio and a carbon-spewing cheeseburger.Ever wonder what the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger is? According to Jamais Cascio, Research Affiliate with The Institute for the Future, it’s 4-6 kg of CO2 equivalent per burger — or 150 million tonnes per year in the United States, given that we eat an average of 100 cheeseburgers per person per year. (I'm sure the Bay Area brought the national average of burgers consumed way down. Thank you Alice Waters!)

Cascio recently spoke about cheeseburger emissions and other unintended consequences of our lifestyles, in a plenary address at the Summer Study of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which took place at Asilomar State Park, Pacific Grove, California, August 17–22. He also discussed 250-mpg hybrid cars, cool roofs, walkable cities, and urban auto congestion charges.

Cheeseburger emissions include that from fuel used to transport beef to market, food that fed the cows that gave the meat and the milk to make the cheese, as well as… cow farts, a significant source of methane, a serious greenhouse gas.

The more I examine our lifestyle, the more I find that it has an impact on the environment equal to, if not greater than, that of our technology. The most energy efficient homes can be operated in a way that makes them energy hogs — turning thermostats way up in the winter and way down in the summer. A myriad of electronic devices, all sucking energy in standby mode, will overcome the best of design intentions. When architects add square yard upon square yard of glazing to new buildings, even ones designed to be efficient and sustainable and to the highest of green building standards, energy efficiency suffers. Even the very best insulating window assemblies deliver at most an R-5 insulation rating, equivalent to about an inch and a half of fiberglass batt insulation.

Because behavior influences energy use so profoundly, the scientists at ACEEE recently hired Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, a sociologist, as a Research Associate. To give you a hint at the kind of research Ehrhardt-Martinez will be doing, here is the title of a recent paper she published in Dialogue: "Energy Efficiency and Socially Rational Behaviors: The Role of Social Sciences in Bridging the Energy-Efficiency Gap and Accelerating Efficiency Gains."

I’m wondering when the energy efficiency community will be calling on the research abilities of people with theological backgrounds. This theologian is ready! I've already come up with the title of my first academic paper, "Measuring the Spiritual R-Value of Homes: Aquinas on Building Tight, and Ventilating Right." Or something like that.

Not everyone would be excited about a box of 16 pounds of meat. But for the members of the Bay Area Meat CSA, the enthusiasm was off the charts. I took part in their spring share this year, where member of the CSA receive a monthly box of pork, poultry, lamb and beef from local Bay Area Farms. The idea began when blogger Bonnie Powell of The Ethicurean put out a call to her readers. Many of them were already getting vegetable CSA's – a meat CSA seemed a logical step. Since then, Tamar Adler, a cook at Chez Panisse stepped in to help run it. And running it is no easy task. This past spring, they were distributing 1,000 pounds a month to members.

Since the CSA only buys whole animals, members get a few interesting things in each delivery. As Adler says, not every cut on an animal is a grill-able cut. Some cuts require other cooking techniques, and so members are challenged to do braises and stews with what they get. The idea is to create a new market for many of the local, small-scale producers. And Adler says she's been getting phone calls from many others looking to join.

Adler has decided the CSA will take the summer off, so she can work on restructuring it into a more cooperative model. As she says, one of the goals of the CSA is for consumers to connect with their producers and she's hoping the CSA's structure can reflect that. The good news is a number of other meat CSA's have arrived on the scene in the Bay Area for those of you looking to join one. Those are:

• The Clark Summit Meat Club
• Sonoma County Meat Buying Club
• Marin Sun Farms
• And here's a list of meat CSA's nationwide

As I also discovered in this story, eating a low-carbon diet is not simple. Researchers are just starting to get a handle on the methodology used to do a life cycle analysis for food. And the news isn't good for meat and cheese lovers – it turns out red meat and dairy products have the highest carbon footprints. The further you dive into their life cycle, the more complicated it gets. Luckily, Gail Feenstra of UC Davis's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program has a few simple tips to cut your carbon.

• Eat less red meat and dairy
• Avoid foods grown in heated greenhouses by eating seasonal food
• Avoid food transported by air by eating locally
• Consolidate your shopping into as few trips as possible
• Waste less food. If it goes into a landfill, it emits the same gases as cows

You can get a sense of the footprint of your diet through the Bon Appetit Management Company's Eat Low Carbon Calculator or you can look up a local farmer's market with Local Harvest.

You may listen to "Eating a Low Carbon Diet" report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Your house may not be your biggest contributer to global
warming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a nifty
carbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbon
footprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction).
Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don's calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.


Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

When football fans tune in on Super Bowl Sunday next weekend, they'll be watching a greener Super Bowl, according to the NFL. Demand for carbon credits is booming, with companies from Dell Computer to Enterprise Rent-a-Car offering their customers offsets with their purchases. But critics are concerned that consumers don't know what they're buying – or might not be getting what they're promised.

The 2006 Word of the Year was "carbon netural" in the The New Oxford English Dictionary. But there's still a lot of debate about what it means. Many people compare the U.S. carbon offset market to the Wild West. Since there is no regulation, how do you know what you're buying?

There are several guides to carbon offsets that have been created by non-profit organizations, designed to help the average consumer (see related resources). But part of the problem is that many people are still debating what a carbon offset should be. And that's a debate that can be found in the blogosphere.

One place you can find it is on the Grist.org blog which has many bloggers writing about green issues. Forestry offset projects, which sell credits based on the fact that trees sequester– or hold carbon dioxide, have come under fire. You can read about a few of the critiques here, here and here.

Another blog, Treehugger.com, has followed the issue as well. They posted this comparison of offset providers to help their readers do their homework and this more in depth guide on the issues buyers should be aware of.

Of course, one of the earliest debates over offsets was whether offsets would act as "indulgences", distracting consumers from making concrete changes in their lifestyles to reduce their carbon footprint. Terrapass, one offset retailer, has tried to investigate this by surveying their customers. They found that the majority of them had already had green habits. Still, the virtues of offsets are a matter of personal opinion.

You may listen to the "Cashing in on Carbon" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Lauren Sommer is an Associate Media Producer for QUEST.

latitude: 37.325510, longitude: -120.640341